If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

AMD/Nvidia wayland support

I'm new to the forums, and still relatively new to Linux-based OS's, and I am still clueless regarding the licenses, so please bear with me, and correct me if you have the time.

Now, I've been scouring the internet for a recent, and actual answer that isn't "that's irrelevant due to timeframe" or something along those lines.

I've read that Nvidia/AMD can't support Wayland with proprietary drivers due to license(s) in regards to kernel mode setting (not sure if I understood that correctly though). I also found that the license(s) might have been changed with the release of kernel 3.9, making it possible anyways.

So the question I find most relevant, is if Nvidia/AMD can support Wayland with binary drivers?
The second question, is if there's any recent rumors, or if Wayland is still too far into the future for AMD or Nvidia, to even consider Wayland-support at this point?

I ask, as I'm trying to prepare others for the move to Linux-based OS's (I know quite a few, that are reluctant to make the switch to windows 8, so as 7 dies out, I'm trying to show them the wonders of OS OS's :P). What I currently find most annoying about most of them (I'm currently messing about with: Ubuntu 12.04/12.10/13.04, Kubuntu 13.04, Mint 15 Cinnamon), are screen-tearing and -flickering. For watching videos, one could 'just' use Open Source drivers, and Wayland, but to my limited knowledge, there's not really any feasible options when it comes to gaming, if one wants to avoid screen-tearing.

From what I found in my searches, it seemed like they'd have to change the drivers quite a bit, and that Nvidia might not support Wayland at all, because the code-base would then differ too much from the windows-drivers (with my limited knowledge of programming, this seems odd to me. I fairly certain that, that X and Wayland works in very different ways, even when using DRI2, but it seems to me, that whatever Wayland does, should be easier for any driver to interpret).
I'm aware that Wayland isn't quite there yet, but compared to what I think I've learned about X - Wayland seems 'simple', structured, and focused, so any development could go relatively fast. So I'm hopeful, and I'm looking forward to 'pixel-perfect' frames, in a somewhat near future

It will take time for individual applications & drivers to get Wayland ports. An interim XWayland layer has been prepared to allow applications that rely on X11-specific functionality to run in Wayland, but the drivers are another issue; OSS drivers won't be a problem but motivating Nvidia and AMD to adapt their binaries is tricky, especially with Canonical's Mir possibly undermining current efforts to do so (there's a theory that proprietary drivers with EGL support could work with both Wayland and Mir, but it's just a theory).

I'm not an expert but it seems the process of migrating applications from X11 to Wayland should be one of simplifying code and removing hacky quirks, which should generally make everyone happy (except maybe the coders who have to get it done). Getting the corporate people to invest time--and therefore money--in developing for a new display stack sounds more difficult.